"An Increasingly Challenging Environment"

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

🎊 Festival Updates

Terrible news out of the UK as short film stalwart, Encounters, cancels its 2024 edition. Festivals are having trouble post-pandemic, but a combo of Brexit and changes in UK funding strategies have sunk the country’s premier short-film-only festival—for now. Read their Trustee’s Statement

🧾 Lineups Announced

• Tribeca’s shorts lineup is out, with new shorts from alums Mickey Duzyj, Jim Cummings, and featured filmmaker-in-waiting, Jorey Worb. In other sections, we were pleased to see Short of the Year winner Graham Parkes is bringing his new video game to the festival.

• Cannes announced the selections for the short film official competition + the student competition, La Cinef. Cheers to alum Daniel Soares for making it into the 11-film official competition!

• Sundance London is after our hearts, because almost the whole lineup, including the feature films, is made up of S/W alums. Check it out.

🍿 Happening This Week

• In NYC, The Lower East Side Festival begins on Thursday. Our own Senior Programmer, Chelsea Lupkin, is on the jury alongside folks like Beanie Feldstein and Lizzy Caplan. She’ll be attending and I’ll try to make it out a night or two as well. Say hi!

• NFFTY - the country’s top festival dedicated to young filmmakers (24 and under) is underway in Seattle. Check out the schedule, which includes keynotes from Raven Jackson and Sean Wang.

• For animation lovers, Pictoplasma starts in Berlin on May 1st. Sophie Koko Gate and Joe Bennett are among 18 confirmed speakers and tickets are still available for in-person or live-streaming.

📅 Upcoming Deadlines

• The regular deadline for Austria’s leading genre festival, SLASH, is April 30th

• Oscar-qualifier Flicker’s Rhode Island has a deadline on May 1st.

• Save £££ with Manchester Animation’s earlybird deadline, May 1st.

• Locarno, fresh on our minds after their online Film Weeks event in February, has its entry deadline on Friday, May 3rd.

🪐 In the Shortverse

• A new curated collection — short films featuring puppets! 

• The prolific filmmaker Danny Sangra is now on Shortverse and brings a new animated microshort featuring Zozia Mamet.

• Paul Trillo has been equally prolific of late and shares a piece that fuses AI and Live-Action.

🔍 Spotlight On: Joanna Arnow

Joanna Arnow first arrived on my radar after winning the Silver Bear at the 2015 Berlinale for her short, Bad at Dancing, and in writing the review for its online premiere two years later, I was struck by that rare feeling that here was an important short from a potentially major new cinematic voice.

Now, 7 years later, I just saw a preview screening of her new feature film ahead of its theatrical debut in NYC and am pleased to report that Arnow has not lost any of her edge. The film is a picaresque look at the character of Joanna (Arnow) as “time passes in her long-term casual BDSM relationship, low-level corporate job, and quarrelsome Jewish family.”

The film, which debuted to great acclaim at Cannes last year before being picked up by Magnolia, is a natural expansion of her polarizing auto-fictional storytelling style, replete with the deadpan humor and unglamorized nudity of her prior work.

I caught up with Arnow after the screening for a short Q&A about the film which expands to LA next month.

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What would you tell people to convince them to go see your movie…?

Oh my God, that’s really difficult!

I know I come up with the hard questions right away. Penetrating interviewer. 😁

Well, it’s a film about someone wrestling with relationships, sexuality, and just how to be. I think we all grapple with those things in some shape or form and since it’s a comedy, my hope is that it will leave people feeling lighter about it all!

For people who know you from shorts, what is something they’ll find familiar in the film, and what is something that’s going to challenge their previous conception of your work?

Like my previous fiction films, I play a fictionalized version of myself, which draws on the self-deprecating, deadpan humor that my shorts have. But, I think this film plays with time, how we experience it, and our patterns. It’s a film told in 5 sections. Sometimes we feel time passes quickly, sometimes slowly, and the film is structured to reflect those variations in our experience.

You’ve been championed by places like Berlinale and Cannes, which strikes me as rare for an American filmmaker working in a DiY mode. How has this support you’ve received helped you with your journey and has it been surprising?

Yeah, I’m really grateful, for the support. This was such a small film, a labor of love, made with a community of friends and folks I’ve worked with before and I honestly wasn’t expecting it to go to Cannes or to be able to find a partner like Magnolia to work with–they’ve been wonderful.

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The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed plays NYC’s Lincoln Center, IFC Center, and Brooklyn’s BAM Rose cinemas this week. Buy tickets here.

🔗Fun Stuff We’re Paying Attention To

🖥️ Watch

• New John Wilson! My Morning With Magic Mike a new short shot after the end of his HBO show, premieres today on Le Cinema Club.

• Behold! The most riveting chase sequence of the year.

• Maegan Houang has a new and excellent music video for Mitski

• Fresh off of last week’s launch of the A Thousand Suns sci-fi anthology, the team released behind-the-scenes videos this week.

📖 Read

• The Hollywood Reporter summarizes the 3rd in a blockbuster trilogy of business consulting reports, this time on Asian and Pacific Islander consumers in the US. McKinsey releases its findings on the amount of $$$ Hollywood is leaving on the table by not servicing diverse audiences. They say $30B! Read the Full Report 

• Discover The Influence of Looney Tunes on Live-Action Filmmakers in this enjoyable read from Cartoon Brew.

• More insight into the mess at Hot Docs from POV Magazine.

• We’ll leave on this nice thread from Scott Leger on 10 Tips for Directors.